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Falkland Islands to choose in referendum: Britain or Argentina?

By John F. BurnsThe New York Times

Posted:
03/10/2013 12:01:00 AM MST

Bill Poole stands in the Falklands capital of Stanley beside posters calling for a "yes" vote to remain British in a referendum Sunday and Monday. Great Britain has held the islands since 1833. (Tony Chatter, AFP/Getty Images)

LONDON — On Sunday and Monday, the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands, a wind-swept, sparsely populated archipelago that was a final way station for early 20th-century explorers like Ernest Shackleton en route to the icy wastes of Antarctica, will go to the polls in a referendum on the islands' future.

A total of 1,672 eligible voters — vastly outnumbered by the islands' estimated population of 1 million penguins and 700,000 sheep — will be asked to answer yes or no to a straightforward proposition:

"Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?"

The alternative would be to begin a transition to Argentine control, perhaps by a period of shared sovereignty, as Argentina has suggested. The vote comes three decades after Argentina tried to settle the issue by force, invading the islands and losing a 10-week war with Britain that cost the lives of 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as three civilians on the islands.

For those inclined to a wager, the referendum is a lead-pipe cinch. The majority of the islands' residents are British citizens, and local pundits expect the vote for retaining the status quo will run a few points short, if that, of 100 percent.

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About the only uncertainty is whether the fog that sweeps over the Falklands will ground the aircraft that carry the ballots from eight separate islands to Stanley, the capital.

The benchmark is a 2002 referendum in Gibraltar, another British dependency, where the vote for retaining the British link or accepting a new status tying the isthmus on which Gibraltar stands to Spain was 98.5 percent. That, too, was not much of a cliffhanger because many of those eligible to vote were of British descent.

For Argentina and Britain, the 1982 conflict was a shock — enough to lead, in time, to the collapse of the Argentine military junta that mounted the invasion, and to propel Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in deep political trouble at home when the war gave her an opportunity to play the "Iron Lady," to a second election victory in 1983.

The hope, sustained for years after the war, was that both countries would put the bitterness behind them and build a relationship on interests like trade that pragmatists on both sides saw as more important than the Falklands.

But in the past few years the old virulence has returned, driven by a surge of Argentine nationalist fervor stirred by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who has adopted measures intended to place economic pressure on the islanders, including banning cruise ships that stop at the islands from Argentine ports.

Both countries have historical claims on the islands, the British one bolstered by their continuous habitation there since the 1830s, the Argentine by the fact that Stanley lies barely 300 miles from the Argentine coast and nearly 8,000 miles from Britain.

To the argument of proximity, Argentina has added in recent times the contention that Britain intends, by keeping control of the Falklands, to rob Argentina of the newly discovered deep-sea oil reserves and rich fisheries within the Falklands' territorial waters.

The referendum has been dismissed by Kirchner, who has said that islanders are "colonial implants" from Britain whose preferences count for nothing against the fact that the islands, known as Las Malvinas to the Argentines, were "stripped" from Argentina by a British naval flotilla that expelled an Argentine settlement in 1833.

That event followed on a convoluted colonial history going back to the 16th century that saw rival claims to the islands, at one point or another, by Britain, France, Portugal and Spain.

To British frustration, their claim to sovereignty over the islands has failed to win U.S. backing under the Obama administration. With an eye to the strong support Argentina has won for its claim among Latin American states, the United States has urged London and Buenos Aires to reach a negotiated settlement.

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